LAING, John Stuart
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BDOHP Interview Index and Biographical Details LAING, (John) Stuart, born 22 July 1948, son of Dr Denys Laing and Dr Judy Laing, née Dods; married 12 August 1972 Sibella, daughter of Sir Maurice Henry Dorman, one son two daughters. Biographical Details with (on right) relevant pages in the interview: Entered Diplomatic Service, 1970 pp 2-3 FO, Desk Officer for Nepal, Sept 1970-July 1971 pp 3-6 Arabic training, MECAS, Sept 1971-Jan 1973 pp 6-10 British Embassy Jedda, Jan 1973-May 1975 pp 10-20 UK REP Brussels, July 1975-78 pp 20-24 FCO London, Desk officer for Germany (WED), Maritime delimitation pp 24-32 (MAED), Namibia (SAfrD), May 1978-83 Head of Chancery, Cairo, 1983-87 pp 32-35 Deputy Head of Near East and North African Department, 1987-89 pp 35-39 Czech language training, 1989 p 39 Counsellor, Prague, Nov 1989 - April 1992 pp 40-44 Deputy Head of Mission and Consul-General, Riyadh, 1992–95 pp 44-52 . Head of Know-How Fund for Central Europe, 1995–98 pp 52-56 High Commissioner, Brunei, 1998–2002 pp 56-64 Ambassador to Oman, 2002-05 pp 65-77 Ambassador to Kuwait, 2005–08 pp 78-85 Reflections on the Diplomatic Service. pp 85-87 1 BRITISH DIPLOMATIC ORAL HISTORY PROGRAMME RECOLLECTIONS OF STUART LAING MA MPhil RECORDED AND TRANSCRIBED BY MOIRA GOLDSTAUB MG: It’s 15th March 2018 and Moira Goldstaub is in conversation with Stuart Laing about his recollections of the Diplomatic Service. Can we start with very general questions about your educational background and how you came to join the Service? SL: Yes. Well, I had a very standard private education. I went to Rugby School and came not quite directly to Cambridge because I was sort of forced through education rather fast at school and did my A-Levels very young, and my parents and I thought it would be a good idea to do something before coming to Cambridge, so I did VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) in India as a teacher for a year when I was 17. So I came to Cambridge when I was just 18. I did Classics. In those days, and it’s still more or less the same, the Classics degree was fairly general in Part 1, for the first two years that is: we did Literature, Language, History and Philosophy, and in Part 2 I specialised in the Philosophy option, mainly doing Plato and Aristotle. I took the entrance to the FCO during my last year at Cambridge. MG: Why did you select that as your career path? SL: Well, that was why I mentioned the India thing, I think it was because of having spent a year abroad. I was interested in working for the British, either public sector or private sector, but with an overseas element to it and I remember thinking at the time and explaining in interviews, all the things that I was applying for had a strong overseas element in them. MG: So what was the selection process? Was it very difficult? They don’t take many people so it’s quite challenging, I imagine. SL: Yes, but I’m always a bit sceptical about people who say things are very difficult, although, come to think of it, actually looking back on my own experience, I think I was interested in the challenge, that’s to say interested in whether I could beat those statistics because it is true, I can’t remember what the figures were at that time but anyway it was well- known among us third-year students that the FO exams were statistically against you. I’m 2 trying to avoid using the word ‘difficult’ because I don’t believe that most employers choose just the best, what they choose is the best fit and I think, and I hope, that the FO was doing that in its interview process. So, a lot of us thought that it was a bit chancy. I had a very good friend, a kind of cousin by marriage, who took the FO exams and didn’t get through the first stage which was just a written exam, and he went on to have a perfectly decent career somewhere else. So I don’t think it was necessarily chancy but the process was trying to identify those people who would fit well in the system. Now, I know there’s been quite a lot of criticism, not recently but about ten years ago, there was a review done of the FO – and Civil Service in general – the FO application system, and the reviewers took exactly this line of criticism, which is ‘ok, so, what we’ve got is a system where the employer is simply trying to find clones for himself, for themselves, in the people that they take in.’ And I suppose there may have been something in that, but I like to think that it was a bit more objective and what they were trying to do was say ‘we are trying to identify those people who can at minimum reach the grade of what was then called Counsellor in their early 40s and go on to take leadership of the Service later on.’ So they were claiming at any rate to identify future leaders. And what was the process? Well, I think you probably have all that on paper. We had a written exam, we then had this two-day series of tests and interviews, which by the time I took it, which was early 1970, was no longer the residential thing but just popping down to London for these tests and interviews and then the Final Selection Board, which is about a 45-minute interview. FO, Desk Officer for Nepal, Sept 1970 – July 1971 MG: You were successful and from the notes you’ve given me, you started in September 1970 as a Desk Officer for Nepal. So, I’d like to hear about your first day and the sort of ambience, what it was like: you’ve referred to coal fires being removed and the tea trolley. SL: They’d just abolished the coal fires and put in central heating, but only a year before: it was still just in recent memory. But the tea trolley continued, that is to say, at about 4 o’clock, there’d be a rattle down the corridor and somebody would come over with a cup of tea for all the officers. I went in, and worked in a Third Room. MG: What does that mean? 3 SL: The First Room was the Head of Department, the Second Room was the Deputy Head of Department, who was also not called that, but was called an Assistant, and then the Third Room was occupied by people of the grade of First, Second, or Third Secretary, who were the Desk Officers. So I was appointed as Third Secretary. Every Department – mine was the South Asian Department – had a Head of Department, who might have been – well, it was a Counsellor grade – might have done a junior Ambassadorial job but would expect to go on to be an Ambassador immediately afterwards, and an Assistant who was a very senior First Secretary, and then us types in the Third Room. And my Third Room consisted of a Desk Officer for India (Political) and a Desk Officer for India (Economic) and myself doing Nepal, and I thought this was quite fun, you know, to have right at the start with no experience at all, yet to have a responsibility for Britain’s bilateral relations with a country, even one as small as Nepal, and there were interests mainly to do with Gurkhas that we needed to keep an eye on. But basically there was not really enough to do. I’ll come back to that in a minute. There was one task which I did have to do, which was really quite interesting, which was that we were at the time preparing papers for publication relating to the process leading up to the Independence and the Partition of India. That was 1947 and so this was less than 30 years earlier, ahead of the 30-year rule, I suppose. We were publishing papers called ‘Transfer of Power’, you can probably find them if you look them up in, they must have been published in the early 70s. And my job, I mean this was something that the other two Desk Officers didn’t have time to do, and so they wanted a junior person to check them over for questions of political sensitivity so that effectively we could cut out those bits which were of continuing political sensitivity. So I read pages and pages of these Transfer of Power documents, which was interesting. And the other atmospheric thing worth passing on - the other thing which I remember being astonished or surprised by – was the kind of deference actually paid to me, a person of no experience, by people who were considerably my senior in age but were junior in rank. I mean, the Service still in a sense operated a little bit, I won’t say like the Armed Forces but reflecting some of the ideas of the Armed Services in terms of rank and promotion. You would definitely get promoted from Third Secretary to Second Secretary, and Second Secretary to First Secretary, and First Secretary to Counsellor, and I think you could find Tables which suggested what rank these equated to in the Armed Services. So I was technically in there as a Third Secretary, equivalent to, I don’t know, Second Lieutenant, or whatever it is.